Interview with a specialist in an NHS procurement department.
This interview on the NHS supply chains was given anonymously by an employee working within the procurement department. The following summarises their experiences of the impact of Brexit Covid-19 and the Ukraine War on the NHS supply chains.
Have you experienced delays in deliveries through your supply chain? Which had the largest impact in percentage terms. Brexit or Coronavirus.
We never found any particular delays were caused by Brexit that I can recall, although there was a lot of work done by central government and locally to check with key suppliers and ensure that they held sufficient stock; and we made our end users aware of the need to maintain adequate but not excessive stock. We worked on the assumption of longer lead times, but never felt that was the case generally. Again with Coronavirus a lot of work was done to mitigate the impact, so there was centralised buying of PPE and that was then distributed by hubs that were set up to manage the demand from local customers. We’ve had fluctuating lead times or items being out of stock on occasion but generally manageable with alternatives. Curiously one of the things that has been an issue with excessive lead times is vehicles, caused by supply chain issues, semi-conductor shortage and shipping matters.
How much impact would be due to the availability of truck drivers or containers, air freight capacity?
Hard to be specific, but see comments above re vehicles.
Are you holding higher stock levels due to current supply chain uncertainties? Is this increasing your storage costs.
“No not locally, more a case of trying to ensure people don’t run out and so keep an eye on usage. But see this extracted from Supply Management magazine, which includes the comment that storing PPE was costing the NHS £500,000 a day: Health chiefs ‘burning £45m of unusable PPE a month’
posted by Juliette Rowsell
Taxpayers’ money is “going up in smoke” with over 800m NHS aprons being burned each month, according to the Labour Party.
Wes Streeting, shadow secretary of state for health and social care, accused the government of “egregious waste” after research by the Labour Party found over 870m unusable aprons are being burnt each month at a cost of £43.5m.
The cost emerged after Jonathan Marron, director general of the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, told the Public Accounts Committee in March 817m items of PPE worth £673m – 3% of the total bought during the pandemic – were not fit for purpose and would be written off. “Some of them are counterfeit. Some of them do not meet the standards,” he told MPs.
He said some unusable PPE had been converted into trays and binbags. “We have done some recycling and we will do more,” he said.
“We will also need to use more traditional waste disposal methods, largely burning it to generate heat and energy. We are exploring that as well. We hope to move 15,000 pallets a month through these lead waste contractors.”
Marron said each pallet held 58,000 aprons.
A further 10% of the total amount of PPE purchased during the pandemic cannot be used by the NHS and is being given to schools or sold.
Marron told the the PAC, which is investigating the Department for Health and Social Care’s (DHSC) management of PPE contracts, 176 contracts worth £3.9bn were being “looked at for various concerns around performance”.
He said at the peak there were 30,000 containers of PPE but this was now down to 12,000 containers at various storage sites across the country.
Speaking on BBC’s Today programme, Streeting said: “Billions of pounds worth of PPE bought by the government during the pandemic was later found to be unusable.
“I just think given the backdrop of the pressure on the public finances, but even more importantly the pressure on family finances right now, the idea that millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is going up in smoke is an insult to families who are paying their taxes, are paying higher taxes and struggling.
“I think what we have seen far too often in the pandemic was egregious waste, so there are big questions for this government to answer.”
Labour is calling for an emergency budget and for the National Crime Agency to investigate PPE “lost to fraud and error”.
In February the DHSC admitted over £2.6bn worth of PPE purchased by the government was unsuitable for use in healthcare settings, while over £670m of PPE could not be used for reasons including it was defective. A further £750m of PPE was “in excess of the amount that will ultimately be needed”. Storing PPE was costing the NHS £500,000 a day.
The DHSC has been approached for comment.”
Have you been able to swap to UK Based supplier?
Suppliers or manufacturers? The latter is used but of course they will often be sourcing overseas too. UK manufacturing where it is available is used. I don’t have data to share on the scope of this.
Have you diversified your supplier base?
A lot of the day to day products come from NHS Supply Chain (they have a website) so they have been working on reviewing their strategy to meet the challenges of the last couple of years. Locally we’ve not needed to take any specific action other than currently done in using a variety of sources.
